Light
by coalitiongirl
Summary: Emma and Regina chat about Emma, post-Kansas.


**super raw, straight from tumblr (by request)**

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She has a lighter in her hand and she doesn't know where it came from. Compulsive kleptomania, probably. She'd been in the drugstore earlier because Snow had panicked about having the wrong kind of Tylenol and she must have grabbed it then and slipped it into her pocket. She flicks it once, watches the flame spark. Thinks _you're a pathetic waste of ability_ and _you have all this potential_ and flicks it again.

The flame is barely there, flickering in the breeze, and she closes her palm around it until it goes out. She remembers Neverland and the docks and her heart throwing Cora away from her and the flame is out and her hand is throbbing like it's been burned. She leans back against the porch stairs and watches the stars, flicking the lighter again and again and again.

"You're going to burn yourself if you keep that up." Regina sits down beside her, crossing her legs just enough that her skirt slides halfway up her thigh.

She stares down at smooth tanned skin and flicks the lighter again. "I already did."

"Let me see." Regina flips her hand over briskly, inspecting the red mark on her palm before a flash of white magic soothes it instantly. "Better?"

"No." She moves her thumb against the side of the lighter and Regina snatches it out of her hands and she slouches until her elbows are on her knees and her chin is on her hands. She remembers the heady rush of magic in her hands, how _easy_ it had been when everything else had been so hard, and she says, "How do you get addicted to magic?"

Regina snorts. "You don't. You get addicted to control. The magic just speeds it along."

She thinks about Henry staying here and their apartment in New York and Mary Margaret and David with their perfect new baby and living a lie for a year and a thousand things left outside her control and her fingers twitch again. "When I cross the town line, will I still feel like this? Like I'm…empty?"

Regina's hand closes a around hers, stilling it. "You're not going anywhere."

"I'm not taking Henry," she says quickly. "I'm going to come back to visit as often as I can. Henry wants to be here and I can't force him to come away with me. I won't separate you two again." She doubts she'd be able to if she'd tried. The false memories have been fading quickly and what's left is an older Henry who adores his adoptive mother like the hero she's become.

He'd been caught up in a shiny new toy with her, excited by the promise of a savior and disillusioned when she'd inevitably failed to live up to his expectations in a year of day-to-day life. She doesn't even think he knows how he looks at her now, like she can't possibly be human.

She isn't human for any of them. She's their hope, their savior, the symbol of victory even when she'd done nothing but lose the only power she'd ever had to live up to them. She can go in there and get claps on the back and praise that belongs to Regina and accept it because that's what they need from her. A hero. An illusion.

"You're not going anywhere," Regina repeats, unimpressed. Her thumb is at Emma's wrist, drawing circles into the skin there, and Emma shivers in the cold.

"They don't need me anymore. You're the one who's been earning these…victory dinners." She gestures behind them to Granny's. "You're the hero today, you said it yourself. This was never my fight. Hook should never have brought me back here. No one needs me." She'd given up the best thing that had happened to her, imperfect as she'd made Regina's happy ending, for nothing at all.

"No," Regina agrees. "They don't." Hearing it from someone else hurts, even from a longtime rival-turned…..friend? maybe? She's been on edge around Regina lately, on edge around everyone, really. But Regina doesn't expect her to be a hero, and it makes her Emma's prime target. She flushes and hates herself just a little more for it when Regina's hand tightens on hers. "But you need them."

"I don't need to be replaced," she says, thinking about Mary Margaret with her arms curled around the baby they did manage to save and Henry tucked under Regina's arm and she doesn't even have a home here anymore, does she? "I don't belong here anymore. I never did."

"So you're going to have a temper tantrum and stomp off to New York?" Regina's laugh is almost cruel. She moves to pull away and Regina yanks her back down. "Punish them for replacing you? Make them wish they'd never given you up?"

"No," she says, but it sounds like _yes_ to both of them and Regina's scowl deepens. "I'm just…I'm tired, Regina. I'm not like you. I don't have some amazingly resilient heart. I just have this…piece of crap," she thumps at her chest, "That only matters because my parents have true love. It's never been me." She opens her palm and thinks about fire tingling within it.

"Emma," Regina says, and it's gentler than she'd been before. Quite abruptly, her fingers dig into her chest, closing against her heart. It's suddenly difficult to breathe, and when Regina can pull her heart out, she feels like crying again.

"Look," she says, and Emma looks down at her own heart, traces with her eyes where it's worn and the red is so faded it's nearly grey. It's supposed to be a pure heart, but it doesn't look like it to her. It looks….exhausted. Jaded. More New York than fairy tale land.

"It's all broken," she whispers, but Regina has let go of her wrist to stroke a finger across it, sending tingles through Emma's chest.

She shakes her head and cradles it in one hand. "It's what it should be," Regina breathes as though she doesn't know that Emma's still here. Then she looks up, her eyes hooded over suddenly, and _no_, she hasn't forgotten that she's here at all. "It's real."

"Isn't everyone's?" she jokes, suddenly more uncomfortable about the look on Regina's face than the heart in her hands.

"Not here." Regina's eyes are bright and she's shaking her head from side to side unconsciously and Emma is afraid to say anything more.

They sit in silence and Emma wants her heart back inside of her but she says nothing, because Regina's hands are soft and her whole chest feels…full, like being safe and true love's kiss and our best chance is together. She inhales, leaning back against the stair rail, her whole body so warm that she can't stand it. "It doesn't stop," she murmurs. "It never stops."

"Being the savior?" Regina stares into her heart, muted pink reflecting off her eyes. "No, I don't imagine it does. Unless you leave. Which you won't."

"You keep saying that." Maybe it's just been too much time being the sheriff to Regina's mayor or the student to her teacher that makes Emma instinctively want to obey and rebel at the same time. Maybe it's just them, Emma and Regina, who don't know how to stop challenging each other. "Why do you even care?"

"It's about Henry," Regina says swiftly, but her fingers are still running along the side of Emma's heart, and the sensations have been shifting from her chest to her belly to her core.

And Emma's tired of this, tired of using the same smokescreen to keep them distant when there's no need for any of it anymore. They both love the same little boy and he's the focal point of their lives but they bob around each other instead of coming together, caught in the same gravitational field around him and never daring to meet. "Not just about Henry," and it's a quiet plea she doesn't dare say louder than a whisper.

Regina turns to stare at her, eyes raw and dark and looking like they…like they used to. In that way that Emma had never dared address but softened beneath regardless. She hasn't seen it since their first week back in Storybrooke, when they'd been working together instead of bumbling around with princes and pirates and thieves, and it humbles her. "Not just about Henry," Regina agrees, and she lifts Emma's heart and places it back into her chest.

It still feels full as she grunts and sags forward as Regina catches her. It feels like it's been infused with a little bit of the magic she'd lost. The warmth still floods her and she presses her fingers against her brow. "I was happy. Before all this. I was_finished_."

"You had nothing to prove to your family anymore." And suddenly Regina sounds just as weary as Emma does, quiet frustration laced through her words. And Emma remembers them telling her that she could be a hero this time as though Regina hasn't been giving of herself for them for over a year now, and Henry's eyes on his other mother as though he expects her to solve everything. And maybe Regina does understand her. "Not every day was an uphill battle."

"Yeah."

Regina lays a hand on her thigh, firm and innocent except that Emma doesn't want it to be at all. "But without it, you're alone."

"With it, I'm alone," she says, and she sees another flash of understanding, a ripple of magic through her heart, and so much empathy it hurts. "We're both going to be alone." For an instant, she contemplates having Regina and Henry come back with her, for all three of them to escape this struggle.

But the town needs a protector. And Regina has no choice but to take care of it when she goes. Alone, trapped under others' expectations, just as trapped as Emma feels now. "Maybe we don't have to be," she murmurs, magic still dancing through her heart.  
For a moment, she can conceive of a future here that makes sense beyond witches and magic and death. Beyond babies her parents keep and not good enough for Henry and a waste of potential she'd never truly had.

Because there's a ghost of a smile on Regina's face as she stands, her hand trailing along Emma's thigh again. "Maybe not," she echoes, opening the door to Granny's again and slipping inside.

It clicks closed again and Emma spreads her hand open and watches a tiny flame spark in her palm, illuminating the darkness around her to grey.


End file.
